When we learned that Meg Pokrass, our novella-in-flash judge, was in the UK this summer, prior to moving here permanently, we grasped the opportunity to invite her to read and meet some other flash fiction writers in the South West. The evening was a resounding success. The lovely upstairs room in St James’ Wine Vaults in Bath was packed and the audience enjoyed a true feast of flash-fictions – a great mixture of styles, tastes and cultural differences.
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Anita Macallum commended by Michelle Elvy for her flash fiction Boobless, tells us how a prompt from her writing group kick started this piece and how keeping things simple is her biggest lesson when she performs her work.
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The twenty-five flash fictions in Stronger Faster Shorter Flash Fictions (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2015) form a chronological narrative spanning a boy’s childhood in the 1970’s to adulthood. Each flash provides a sense of the narrator inviting the reader to peer into the past and experience the emotional truth of ‘our world, up the M6’ (as termed in Butlins with Books). Sometimes the narrator looks back with a measured eye, at other times he is rummaging in the past rediscovering people and places that recall further memories and provoke reflection.
There is a nostalgic quality throughout as the narrator shines a flashlight on a multitude of emotionally resonant characters including: a singing alcoholic, a goat murderer, a spoon playing war veteran, CB radio hams, pigeon fanciers, a university student, war survivors, a burned man on a bus and an ex-lover’s friend.
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I should be clear about this right from the beginning. I LOVE The Molotov Cocktail being freakishly keen on the strangely, darkly weird. I enter all their comps and won their last themed Flash Fiction competition in May – Flash Felon. This interview with its creator, Josh Goller is therefore more starry-eyed big-up than incisive critique. Having said that I can genuinely think of nothing not to like about the darkly whimsical retro-styled badass flash zine based under gloomy Portland skies in the USA.
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Carrie Etter is an American award-winning poet, resident in the UK since 2001. She has three published collections, The Tethers (Seren 2009), Divining for Starters (Shearsman 2011) and Imagined Sons (Seren 2014) and is also a flash fiction writer. Carrie is senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she has taught since 2004. Carrie Etter’s recently published flash fiction chapbook Hometown (V Press) is reviewed here by Santino Prinzi. You can hear Carrie read from the chapbook alongside Meg Pokrass, K M Elkes, Santino Prinzi, and Diane Simmons at our Evening of Flash Fiction, St James Wine Vaults, Bath on Friday 29th July.
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Hometown (V.Press, 2016) is the debut fiction pamphlet from the poet, lecturer, and critic Carrie Etter, whose most recent collection, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society.
The collection explores the lives of characters living in the American Midwest and is divided into two sections, with the second section detailing “the aftermath of a white man’s accidental killing of a black man in central Illinois” in a series of flashes. For this reviewer, the perfect flash is a complete story in itself, can be read quickly, but remains in the mind of the reader long after an initial reading, the type of flash you read and have to step away from the text so you can recover; if you’re looking for a collection of flashes that do exactly this then look no further.
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We’re excited to announce this new competition judged by author, teacher and editor Meg Pokrass whose novella, Here, Where We Live is one of the flash-fiction novellas included in the Rose Metal Press awarding winning guide My Very End of the Universe – five Novellas-in-flash and a study of the form.
From My Very End of the Universe:
“One way to describe the interplay between flash fiction and novellas-in-flash is to think of each flash as a star. Stars stand alone…In nearly every era and culture, humans have named the stars and then taken those beloved luminous points and connected them in the sky into shapes and stories. Novellas-in-flash are like those constellations: writers linking their flashes together into a larger image– into narratives deep with possibilities”
Read Meg’s interview here for more information.
And if you are in Bath on 29th July do come and hear Meg read alongside poet and flash-fiction writer, Carrie Etter. Places available for booking here.